Support Independent Journalism!
9/11 Blogger receives no foundational or corporate support. Help us cover the news and improve the site by becoming a monthly donor.
Donate via Bitcoin@
(click for our btc address)
(view transactions)
Hazardous asbestos fibers at the WTC exposed more than 110,000 people to the dangerous material; this includes 80,000 tower workers, 30,000 area residents and nearly 4,000 first responders. Asbestos exposure is directly linked to mesothelioma cancer and other asbestos-related diseases.
We have no idea whether or not the Boston bombings were false flag terrorism … the trick which governments from around the world have admitted they use to justify war or consolidate power.
But interest in false flag terrorism is at an all-time high.
Specifically, here’s the interest in the phrase “false flag” between 2004 – when Google Trends was launched – and today:
Everyone knew that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (update here).
Dick Cheney admits that he lied about 9/11.
MSNBC recently noted that these two facts are intertwined:
Mark Rossini, was then an FBI counter-terrorism agent detailed to the CIA. He was assigned the task of evaluating a Czech intelligence report that Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attack on the World Trade Towers.
Cheney repeatedly invoked the report as evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11. “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April,” Cheney said on Meet the Press on Dec. 9, 2001.
But the evidence used to support the claim–a supposed photograph of Atta in Prague the day of the alleged meeting—had already been debunked by Rossini. He analyzed the photo and immediately saw it was bogus: the picture of the Czech “Atta” looked nothing like the real terrorist. It was a conclusion he relayed up the chain, assuming he had put the matter to rest.
Preface: This is not a partisan post. We have repeatedly documented that Obama is as bad or worse than the Bush administration.
In the run up to the Iraq war – and for several years thereafter – the program of torture carried out by the Bush administration was specifically specifically aimed at establishing a false justification for war. Dick Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture. (The former director of the CIA said Cheney oversaw American torture policies).
The type of torture used by the U.S. on the Guantanamo suspects is of a special type. Senator Levin revealed that the the U.S. used Communist torture techniques specifically aimed at creating false confessions (see this, this, this and this).
According to NBC News:
In fact, the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on third-hand accounts of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.
The New York Times’ Maureen Daud writes today:
In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” [Cheney said] “I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out.” Mr. Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynn left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.
“I gave the instructions that we’d authorize our pilots to take it out,” he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: “After I’d given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment.”
***
When they testified together before the 9/11 Commission, W. and Mr. Cheney kept up a pretense that in a previous call, the president had authorized the vice president to give a shoot-down order if needed. But the commission found “no documentary evidence for this call.”
In other words, Cheney pretended that Bush had authorized a shoot-down order, but Cheney now admits that he never did … and Cheney acted as if he was the president on 9/11.
Cheney lied about numerous other facts related to 9/11 as well. For example, Cheney:
Americans Are Acting Like Slowly Boiling Frogs
In the classic history of Nazi Germany, They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer writes:
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
The German citizens were boiling frogs … the water heating up so gradually that they didn’t realize they had to jump out of the pot to safety.
Because the exact same thing is happening to Americans (fear of terror makes people stupid no matter what country they live in), let’s remember exactly what we’ve lost in recent years …
Kangaroo Court Show Trials
Huffington Post reports:
A judge expressed frustration on Monday that an unknown U.S. government entity censored his courtroom audiovisual feed, cutting public access to pretrial hearings for five accused Sept. 11 plotters.
“If some external body is turning the commission on or off based on their own views of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation … then we’re going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on and off,” said the judge, Col. James Pohl.
Pohl’s comments came after an unknown censor cut off a live media feed to the court proceedings as David Nevin, a lawyer defending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, began discussing his request for information on his client’s case.
***
A court security officer positioned next to the judge has the ability to dump the feed if anything secret arises. That officer didn’t activate the censorship button on Monday.
***
“I would like to know who has the permission to turn that light on and off, who is listening to this, who is controlling these proceedings, or controlling that aspect of these proceedings,” Nevin said.
This is just one of a series of outrages regarding investigation and trial of alleged 9/11 terrorists.
In 2008, the former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions disclosed that the trials have been rigged to prevent the possibility of acquittal. Specifically, the head of the Guantanamo tribunal — who is actually in charge of both prosecuting and defending the suspects — told the former chief prosecutor:
Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.
In addition, three other Guantanamo prosecutors — Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr and Capt. Carrie Wolf — “asked to be relieved of duties after saying they were concerned that the process was rigged. One said he had been assured he didn’t need to worry about building a proper case; convictions were assured.”
Another former Guantanamo prosecutor resigned, saying in a sworn declaration that the government pulled all sorts of shenanigans in one case.
Violence and Threats Being Used to Intimidate and Coerce the American Public for Political Purposes
We’ve documented that – by any measure – America is the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world.
But remember, terrorism is defined as:
The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.
The American government has also been using violence and threats to intimidate and coerce the American public for political purposes.
For example, the U.S. government is doing the following things to terrorize the American public into docility and compliance:
U.S. constitutional law has taught for hundreds of years that chilling the exercise of our liberties is as dangerous to freedom than directly suppressing them.
Preface: As a patriotic American – I was born here, lived here all of my life, and love this country – I want the best for the U.S.
Lawless actions are tearing my country apart. I want my country to regain its vision, strength and moral compass. Thomas Jefferson said that “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. I criticize my country because I know we are better than this … and that if enough people know how far we have fallen, we can start to pull ourselves back and reclaim our greatness.
The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom said:
By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.
(audio here).
The Washington Post reported in 2010:
The United States has long been an exporter of terrorism, according to a secret CIA analysis released Wednesday by the Web site WikiLeaks.
The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by our CIA and FBI.
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam”.
He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
The Iraq war was really about oil, according to Alan Greenspan, John McCain, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, a high-level National Security Council officer and others.
Dick Cheney made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11.
The Sunday Herald reported:
Five months before September 11, the US advocated using force against Iraq … to secure control of its oil.
The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this). According to French intelligence officers, the U.S. wanted to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to transport Central Asian oil more easily and cheaply. And so the U.S. told the Taliban shortly before 9/11 that they would either get “a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs”, the former if they greenlighted the pipeline, the second if they didn’t. See this, this and this.
Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter told University of New Hampshire School of Law that the “pervasive civic ignorance” in the U.S. could bring dictatorship:
I don’t worry about our losing a republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about it because of a coup by the military, as has happened in some other places. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed people will not know who is responsible, and when the problems get bad enough — as they might do for example with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown — some one person will come forward and say: ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’
That is how the Roman republic fel. Augustus became emperor not because he arrested the Roman senate. He became emperor because he promised that he would solve problems that were not being solved.
Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor has also warned of dictatorship.
Of course, they’re not the only ones warning of fascism.
Solving the Mystery of WTC Building 7 - Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Top Experts Say Official Explanation Makes No Sense
Numerous structural engineers – the people who know the most about office building vulnerabilities and accidents – say that the official explanation of why building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11 is “impossible”, “defies common logic” and “violates the law of physics”:
It has been thoroughly documented that 9/11 was entirely foreseeable … including Al Qaeda’s plans to fly planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
It has been extensively documented that the White House decided to invade Iraq before 9/11:
(Indeed, neoconservatives planned regime change throughout the Middle East and North Africa 20 years ago; sorry, Obama fans, the neoliberals are not very different).
Right after 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld accused Iraq of having a hand in the attacks. People may not remember now, but – at the time – the supposed Saddam-9/11 link was at least as important a justification for the Iraq war as the alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Bush and Cheney then launched a systematic program of torture in an attempt to create false evidence – through false confessions – of a link between Iraq and 9/11. The torture techniques used were Communist techniques specifically designed to produce false confessions.
Ferdinando Imposimato is the honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy, and former Senior Investigative Judge, Italy.
Imposimato presided over several terrorism-related cases, including the kidnapping and ultimate assassination of President Aldo Moro, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, other political assassinations and kidnapping cases and several cases against the Mafia. He is a former Senator who served on the Anti-Mafia Commission in three administrations.
Imposimato is also a former legal consultant to the United Nations regarding institution of laws to control drug trafficking.
This week, Judge Imposimato stated publicly in writing that 9/11 was just like the “strategy of tension” carried out in Italy.
Specifically, the former Italian Prime Minister, Italian judges, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.
As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred).
And watch this BBC special:
In December, an American court entered a default judgment against Iran for allegedly having a hand in the September 11th attacks. 1
On the other hand, a 9/11 Commissioner and the Co-Chair of Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 both say in sworn declarations that the Saudi government is linked to the 9/11 attacks. 2
Then again, right after 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld accused Iraq of having a hand in the attacks.
People may not remember now, but – at the time – the supposed Saddam-9/11 link was at least as important a justification for the Iraq war as the alleged weapons of mass destruction. 3
Of course, the Afghanistan war was largely based upon the allegation that the leaders of that country – the Taliban – had harbored Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda terrorists. In other words, the U.S. government treated Afghanistan as being complicit in 9/11 by giving refuge to the 9/11 attackers. 4
At a minimum, America unintentionally created an atmosphere in which Al Qaeda terrorists could thrive. But numerous former U.S. military and intelligence officers think that rogue elements within the U.S. government intentionally allowed or facilitated the attacks.
A government official told Fox News:
Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.
Israelis were clearly spying on the 9/11 hijackers within America before 9/11. See this, this, this, this and this.
“False flag terrorism” is defined as a government attacking its own people, then blaming others in order to justify going to war against the people it blames. Or as Wikipedia defines it:
False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy’s strategy of tension.
The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship in its own navy. Because the enemy’s flag, instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, was hung, it was called a “false flag” attack.
Indeed, this concept is so well-accepted that rules of engagement for naval, air and land warfare all prohibit false flag attacks.
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
Preface: The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom - noted:
Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.
On this eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, we would like to take a look back at what went wrong.
While the Bush administration tried to make its response to 9/11 its crowning achievement, the truth is that they acted with criminal incompetence and ass-covering.
(1) The U.S. is at least partly responsible for creating Al Qaeda. For example, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser admitted on CNN that we organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets.
Professor of strategy at the Naval War College and former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer John R. Schindler documents, the U.S. supported Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda terrorists in Bosnia.
(2) The chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable. It is thoroughly-documented that an attack such as 9/11 was entirely foreseeable. Specifically, Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen.
(3) U.S. intelligence services have repeatedly infiltrated Al Qaeda and related groups, but then idiotically failed to stop them. For example – as the New York Times, CBS News and others reported – the FBI informant involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center begged the FBI to substitute fake bomb power for real explosives, but his FBI handler moronically let real explosives be used.
Similarly – as reported by Newsweek, the New York Times and others – an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to 2 of the 9/11 hijackers while they were in the U.S., but then stupidly failed to stop them.
In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the country of Oceania has been in a war against Eurasia for years.
Oceania suddenly switches sides, naming Eastasia as its enemy and making its mortal enemy, Eurasia, its new ally.
The government uses propaganda to convince people that, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”. The dumbed-down public doesn’t even notice that they’ve switches sides, and blindly rallies around Eurasia as its perennial friend and ally.
The same thing is happening in real life with Al Qaeda.
Western governments and mainstream media have admitted that Al Qaeda is fighting against the secular Syrian government, and that the West is supporting the Syrian opposition … which is helping Al Qaeda.
Similarly, the opposition which overthrew Libya’s Gadaffi was mainly Al Qaeda … and they now appear to be in control of Libya (and are instrumental in fighting in Syria.)
The U.S. also funds terrorist groups within Iran.
Of course, Al Qaeda was blamed for 9/11, and the entire decades-long “War on Terror” was premised on rooting out Al Qaeda and related groups.
So the fact that we now consider Al Qaeda fighters to be allies in any way, shape or form is positively Orwellian.
Self-confessed 9/11 “mastermind” falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit
The Inspector General for the the U.S. Department of Defense reports that the military heavily drugged some detainees in a way which impaired their ability to provide accurate information:
Detainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information,” according to a declassified Department of Defense (DoD) inspector general’s report.
***
Over the past decade, dozens of current and former detainees and their civilian and military attorneys have alleged in news reports and in court documents that prisoners held by the US government in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan were forcibly injected with unknown medications and pills during or immediately prior to marathon interrogation sessions in an attempt to compel them to confess to terrorist-related crimes of which they were accused.
Glenn Greenwald has two must-read posts on the reason that virtually everyone the U.S. kills is called a “militant” or “suspected militant”.
He wrote Monday:
Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.
David Swanson writes today:
Almost every [history of past activism] includes belated discoveries of the extent to which government officials were influenced by activist groups even while pretending to ignore popular pressure.
These revelations can be found in the memoirs of the government officials as well, such as in George W. Bush’s recollection of how seriously the Republican Senate Majority Leader was taking public pressure against the war on Iraq in 2006.
Of course, activism that appears ineffectual at the time can succeed in a great many ways, including by influencing others, even young children, who go on to become effective activists — or by influencing firm opponents who begin to change their minds and eventually switch sides.
The beautiful thing about nonviolent activism is that, while risking no harm, it has the potential to do good in ways small and large that ripple out from it in directions we cannot track or measure.
The anniversary of Bin Laden’s death is big news.
Obama is bragging about how he whacked Bin Laden, accusing Romney of being too soft to take out bad guys.
Romney supporters accuse Obama of “spiking the football” and inappropriately showing off to score political points.
Both sides are missing the big picture. Specifically, we noted last year:
I’m as happy as the next red-blooded American that Bin Laden is dead.
For more than a decade, the government has said that Bin Laden is the world’s worst terrorist, a terrorist kingpin, the head of the worst terrorist group in the world.
But if we captured and interrogated him, he could have spilled a lot of beans which would help prevent future terrorist attacks.
Right?
By leading anti-war activist David Swanson, author of Day Break and War Is A Lie, who runs the websites DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org (formerly AfterDowningStreet.org)
Sibel Edmonds’ new book, “Classified Woman,” is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.
The experiences she recounts resemble K.’s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.
I’ve read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.
The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.
Edmonds took a job as a translator at the FBI shortly after 9-11. She considered it her duty. Her goal was to prevent any more terrorist attacks. That’s where her thinking was at the time, although it has now changed dramatically. It’s rarely the people who sign up for a paycheck and healthcare who end up resisting or blowing a whistle.
Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to or working against U.S. national security. The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves. The ordinary competent person with good intentions who risks their job to “say something if you see something” is the rarest commodity. Hence the elite category that Edmonds found herself almost alone in: whistleblowers.
Reuters notes that the leader of Al Qaeda – Ayman al-Zawahri – is backing the Syrian rebels, and asking his followers to fight the Syrian government.
Some of the main Al Qaeda fighters who overthrew Gadaffi – and now appear to be in control of Libya – are already helping the Syrian rebels.
This is curious, given that the U.S. is considering military options for ousting the Syrian government, American allies Britain and Qatar allegedly already have foreign troops inside Syria, and the U.S. has been planning regime change in Syria for over 50 years.
Mainstream reports also state that the U.S. and its allies are backing Iranian terrorists.
I thought Al Qaeda was America’s mortal enemy. Why are we backing terrorists?
Preface: This post does not discuss whether or not 9/11 was a “false flag” operation or an “inside job”. Anything other than a discussion of the negligence of the Bush administration is unnecessary for the purposes of this essay, and is thus beyond the scope of this post.
In case you didn’t get the memo, we are currently in a depression. And see this
And given that American citizens can be indefinitely detained or assassinated at the whim of the president, it is pretty clear that we now live in a police state.
This post will demonstrate – without getting into discussions of an “inside job” one way or the other – that the failure to hold a real 9/11 investigation is a core cause of our loss of our prosperity and freedom.
Top economists say that endless war bankrupts a nation.
For example, Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz says that the $3-5 trillion spent on the Iraq war alone has been very bad for the American economy. See this, this and this.
The endless wars have also been a main component of America’s soaring debt:
Many things which we’ve been told have only happened recently actually started a long time ago.
For example, the mainstream media claims that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon. But the Christian Science Monitor notes that the U.S. has been claiming for more than 30 years that Iran was on the verge of nuclear capability.
And the decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11.
As another example, journalists from across the spectrum have documented the militarization of police forces in the United States, including, CNN, Huffington Post, Forbes, Esquire, The Atlantic, Salon, and the Cato Institute.
Indeed, police shooting peaceful “occupy” protesters with rubber bullets, tear gas and other projectiles and brutally beating them has brought this issue to the attention of the American public. See this, this and this.
But the militarization of police started long before 9/11 … in the 1980s. As Radley Balko testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime:
The Iraq war was really about oil, according to Alan Greenspan, John McCain, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, a high-level National Security Council officer and others.
Dick Cheney made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11.
The Sunday Herald reported:
Five months before September 11, the US advocated using force against Iraq … to secure control of its oil.
Congressman Ed Markey said in March
Well, we’re in Libya because of oil.
John Bolton spoke last week about:
The critical oil and natural gas producing region that we fought so many wars to try and protectour economy from the adverse impact of losing that supply or having it available only at very high prices.
Anyone who paid any attention to the claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Gulf oil spill or the Fukushima nuclear accident knows that the government often twists science to promote certain policy objectives, such as drumming up support for the invasion of Iraq or becoming a booster for nuclear power and big oil (and thus downplaying the damage from nuclear accidents and oil spills).
Bush and Clinton counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke alleges that the CIA improperly blocked information from being passed to the FBI which would have stopped 9/11. Many other top counter-terrorism experts question the “official” governmental version of 9/11 as well.
Yesterday, FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds – along with producers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy – named two additional CIA officers who they allege blocked the information from being passed to the FBI. See this, this and this.
According to New Yorker and Wall Street Journal reporter Jane Mayer, one of these CIA agents was also instrumental in U.S. torture and rendition, including the torturing of an innocent man.
It is certainly beyond dispute that 9/11 was foreseeable. And it is beyond dispute that the CIA could have stopped 9/11, but failed to do so.
But other intelligence agencies – like the NSA – were also listening into the hijackers’ phone calls, and an FBI informant rented a room to two hijackers. So it is not like the other agencies were helpless in light of CIA failures. NSA, FBI or other intelligence services could have stopped 9/11 as well. And various government teams tasked with tracking Al Qaeda were disbanded or stopped prior to 9/11. See this.
